- Author: Philip Greenspun
- Format: online HTML
- Price: free
This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I’ve made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won’t have to repeat those mistakes.
In a society that increasingly rewards specialists and narrowness, Web publishing is one of the few fields left where the generalist is valuable. To make a great site, you need to know a little bit about writing, photography, publishing, Unix system administration, relational database management systems (RDBMS), user interface design, and computer programming. I have thus assumed no specific technical background among my readers and have tried to make the text self-contained.
Chapters include:
- Envisioning a site that won’t be featured in suck.com
- So you want to join the world’s grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
- Scalable systems for on-line communities
- Static site development
- Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
- Adding images to your site
- Publicizing your site
- So you want to run your own server
- User tracking
- Sites that are really programs
- Sites that are really databases
- Database management systems
- Interfacing a relational database to the Web
- ecommerce
- Case studies
- Better living through chemistry
- A future so bright you’ll need to wear sunglasses
